Guild Wars 2

You don’t unlock your masteries by advancing the story. You could in unlock all of your masteries and then complete the story if you want.

When you XP bar is full, you need to spend mastery points to unlock the mastery. You have two type of points, one for Tyria(orange) to unlock mastery for Tyria and Magguma(Green) to unlock masteries for Magguma.

If you look at your achievement screen, you gonna see either orange or green star, they show you which achievement give you which type of mastery point.

Once your xp bar is full and you have enough point, you can unlock the mastery by clicking on it.

There is no profession that are useless. You can do pretty much any content with any profession. But when you talk about end game like raid, there is composition, build and profession that are better than others. It doesn’t mean that you can’t do the content with any profession, but some group will want to be as efficient as possible. The thing is that what is the most efficient change over time and depend on what content you want to focus on. So unless you want to do raid on a regular basis or make speed run you shouldn’t worry too much about that. Pick the profession you like the most and you will be alright.

DeceiverX.8361:

It’s too easy to access currently to enable it to work like that. You have things like Healing Spring, some options on thief via SP, the potential absurdity that would be a blob of BM Cleric necromancers in large-scale combat casting MoB with staff (permanent AoE 10k health per second heals), PU breaking mesmer substantially, and engineer and ranger just having way too much access in general.

It’s a neat idea, and one which would probably help make Regen not horrible, but it’d require a massive overhaul of access to it. That said, boons themselves need a huge rework as it is, because they’re just way too strong.

Well they reworked Stability in a similar way so i doudt it would take that much work. I would like to see something like that implemented because right now regen is not really usefull.

simplesimon.2084:

Yes there is an LFG, but what is wrong with wanting some faster an easier for people that don’t care who they run with.

You could flag for the dungeons your interested in. Once there is 5 people you are given a prompt just like in spvp.

Once everyone excepts you are ported to the dungeon.

You start a LFG with all welcome and continue to play until you have the 5 people in your party. WP in the map and done. Pretty much exactly the same thing.

Your idea just need some precious devs times for very little advantage over the current system. Precious devs time that they could use on something a lot better for the game.

Well this system would have the same problem as legendary have right now. Stats swapping without runes/sigils swapping is almost completely useless.

Now there is the argument that OriOri made that stats swapping is a current advantage of Legendary over ascended. Tbh there is no objective answer to that. At launch legendary used to have 1 stats per legendary and you couldn’t change it. So for exemple, my Sunrise was Soldier stats and I was stuck with that for a long time. But people were still willing to make the effort to get the legendary even that would make their build less efficient. So the stats swapping doesn’t need to be limited to legendary. It usually don’t factor in the decision of a player to get or not a legendary.

That said, I personnaly believe that stats swapping should remain a specific advantage of legendary over ascended. If only they could had rune/sigil swapping too. But I wouldn’t be mad if they added that swapping capability to ascended. Especially if you need to craft each stats to enchant it, while Legendary have access to all stats for ’’free’’.

- GW2 Living Story is the content added to the game on a regular basis. The season 1 was all one time content so you can’t access it. But season 2 and 3 you can access it when you want. If you log in the game even 1 sec, you will unlock the current episode. If you never log in during one episode then you won’t have access to it and you need to pay gem (from cash or in-game gold) to get it. But they usually cost 2-3$ each if you missed them. So if you log in now you will have Rising Flames for free, but you probably lack the episode 1.

- The mastery system work this way. It’s divided between Tyria and Magguma. You can work on your Tyria masteries when in Tyria (base game) and you Magguma masteries when in Magguma (expansion/living story). You only need to go into your mastery menu and select which mastery you want to train. The game select one automatically you can change it if you prefer a particular mastery first. From that point every time you gain xp in the game from whatever source you will fill your mastery xp bar. Once you reach the amount of xp needed for that mastery you then need to spend Mastery Points to unlock it and be able to use it. If you don’t have the points you can still select another mastery and train that one until you have enough mastery points to unlock your first trained mastery.

- If you go into your hero panel/achievement, you can see green or orange star. The orange one mean that there is achievement in there you can complete you earn a Tyria Mastery point and the green one is for Magguma Mastery Point. You have more Mastery Point in-game that you need to unlock every mastery. So you can choose to ignore some mastery point that you find boring or too difficult to get.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

However, the reason for the lower price today ultimately hurts those who don’t multiloot, because for the same effort they used to put in, they end up with less coin while those who do multiloot continue to rake it in.

I just can’t get aboard that argument. Silverwaste dropped the price of several item. Did that hurts people who didn’t do silverwaste?? Anet can add a lot of content/update that increase or decrease the price or any item as they see fit to keep the market healthy.

It’s not an argument against or for AB multimap, it’s an argument against any content that chance prices, which is kind of absurd if you ask me.

The only debate about multimapping should be about :
- Does it too many reward for too little effort? Making any other sort of content unrewarding in comparison. Especially for a content that have almost no little on it since you can do it each 2 hours all day, all week.

- Does it have unintended consequences on the market that Anet disagree with. Which is hard for players to debate because we don’t know what Anet plan are. Did they already planned or decreasing the prices of Glob or maybe they planned on adding more recipes with globs? In that case the drop in prices would be a good thing.

- Is that an exploit? The line if fine because creative or smart use of the game design and exploit. Only anet can answer that since it’s pretty subjective.

Menadena.7482:

A low price on something only helps you if you want to buy. I salvage and sell much more often than I craft something.

It advantage people that buy them and disadvantage people that sell them. It’s not an argument against or for the multi map. A lot of things added or discovered about the game make price vary for a lot of items.

TBH I don’t view multimapping as an exploit. But I also think they should fix is.

I personally don’t have much problem entering and completing Dragon Stand. That said, the current design is just bad.

1) If you gonna have map on a timer you should have a timer in-game so that people don’t have to look for a website with the timer on it.
2) In game design you have the concept of entry and exit point. The concept is that your game should have natural exit and entry point into a content and for more casual player you want easier and more frequent entry/exit point. And tbh open world is suppose to be the casual content of GW2 and an entry/exit point each 2 hours is just too big. Hell that at the limit even for more hardcore players, that the entry/exit point of a raid.
3) The timer is even worst for Dragon Stand because if you can’t fill your map in the first 15-20min the chance of succeeding the meta is pretty small. The window to get into a successful map is very small.

This map should have followed the Silverwaste system from day one. Player driven events instead of time base. The is ways to make the current map work nicely with LFG and Timers, but it still a bad design.

Djinn.9245:

You’re fighting a losing battle – some people believe everything is fine in GW2 and whatever you find difficult they find easy.

We can disagree with OP without believing that everything is fine in GW2. I was higly disappointed with HOT, enough that I left that game for several months and only getting back from time to time for the living world episode.

But the difficulty argument will never end. There will always be people finding the content too difficult or too easy. Even if anet make the content easier so that OP feel it’s just perfect, there will still be someone else complaining that they have a hard time with the content and anet need to make it easier.

It’s not deflation it’s offer and demand. With each new content the devs add different rewards that will affect the market. Usually, they reward item that they want the price to drop. That control the offer.

There is also new recipes and reward that could allow you different ways to get an item. For exemple, over the last couple of months they added a couple of ways to get ascended item, so less people might need the crafting material to craft ascended armor. That control the demand.

Also the Multimap AB farm is kind of screwing up several material. Don’t know if the devs will nerf or let it the way it is now.

I think that balancing what already exist in the game would do a big impact without all the developpement time need to make the current system more complexe.

- Not all existing weapons are equal currently and some have such similar role that only one can be on top at the same time. Take the Guardian’s Sword, the Ele’s scepter, the warrior main hand mace, etc.

- Same with trait. Trait like Zealous Scepter, Wrathful Spirit, Binding Jeopardy for the Guardian. Of course the choice are limited when half of your traits are highly situationnel at best.

- How many utilities and elite skill are completely gabage? The ranger is probably the best exemple of that. About half of them are completely useless unless you create a specific build for them.

- And finally the runes. Think like the rune of the Engineer could be awesome for engineer direct damage build, but it give condition damage and toughness. For a good portion of the runes you either have a bad 6th bonus, or it’s pair with completely useless stats.

- There is also the stats thing that limit the build diversity, but that’s a more complex problem that not everybody agree. Nobody is against make more skills, trait and runes viable so they should start with that imo.

You could never exchance hero point into spirit shard.

Before they changed the system, you had skill points. Skill points could be used to either unlock skills or to buy crafting material. They later split skill points into hero point for skills and spirit shard for crafting.

Trust me. In the old system skill points for crafting was very rare since our only source was hero challenge and levelling. Now you can drop spirit shard everywhere.

OmskCamill.6412:

>Runes can be moved in and out of these slots freely.
>Done.

Ok, done. And how about all that green runes that you receive as loot?

Well there is two problems here. The first and biggest is how the rune system limit your ability to swap your build. And tbh being able to move in and out your runes freely is by far the best answer to that problem.

The second is how much useless rune we get. That problem can be divided in 2 sources. First because so much runes are simply useless in their design and absurdly situational. That can only be fixed by balancing them, which should have been done years ago. And secondly because of minor and major.

Major rune used to actually have value. I wasn’t playing gw2 during the summer, but in June the supply of major rune exploded from a stable 12k constant supply to the current 30k. I don’t know what happen exactly, but Ant changed something while I was gone that affected drastically this market and it could be fix.

For Minor runes? They can pretty much do whatever they want tbh. They could remove them all, make the vendor view them as junk or allow us to salvage them for junk.

- Ascended gear is the best gear in the game so ya that’s enough. For fractal, you gonna need to put infusion in your ascended gear to get Agony Resistance. But you don’t need any up to level 19 and by the time you reach that level you will get enough infusion to continue progressing.

- Fractal is not level dependent. That said, it’s a good idea to do fractal in level order and not skip them too much. First of all because if you go too high and don’t have the Agony Resist you will hurt yourself and your team. Fractal are harder and harder the higher the level so the more level you skip the bigger the step in difficulty it will be. In higher level people expect you to at least know the mechanics about the factal that you should have learned in low level. You have achievement and collection to do all level so it’s a good idea to do them all anyway. It also give you time to accumulate Agony Resist as you level up.

- You shouldn’t try raiding until you are fairly advanced in fractal. Raid is a step higher than fractal in term of difficulty. Looking up for a good build is a good thing to do in fractal, but not necessary. But for raid, it’s a must.

- It depend on which lockpick and key. Geode’s are usefull for specific item that you might or might not want. Dungeon token are always worth it because if you don’t need the gear they allow you to buy, you might buy rare or exotic and salvage them for a profit.

- Fractal have daily that give you added bonus. I would suggest you do only do the daily of your level and then start to slowly explore HoT maps. Try to do your map complete and do events as you seem them and try to figure out how the meta work, because all 4 initial map in HoT are meta driven like Silverwaste and Dry Top. Meaning that most event are part of a bigger meta.

I’m a former raiding group leader and latter join a couple of different raiding guild. The fact is that all raiding group i have been with always look for more players to join them. People take break, some leave, all have different schedule, etc So most if not all raiding group always look to get more players so they can raid on a more regular basis.

Rauderi.8706:

I don’t mind them being appropriately challenging. I do mind that they require 2+ people to be in the same area for something that should be solo progression.

That’s the thing. Why it should be solo progression? Why is it wrong that about 20 out of the 250+ hero challenge are group challenge?

Only a portion of the hero challenge are group content and you don’t even need to complete those to progress your character. Personally, I hated most hero challenge except those that were group content. They were more fun, it gave us a reason to play together to regroup with my guild, to make event to help others. I would prefer that all of the hero challenge were like that tbh. But I know that some people prefer to do those alone so have only a portion of them (and make them optional) seem like the best compromise for me.

- The link cakemeister provide give you the recipe.

- Yes Viper gear is more expensive than berserker gear

- The actual price will depend on what material is needed to make the inscription/insignia.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Orichalcum_Imbued_Inscription
For exemple here Cavalier inscription is cheap because you can’t craft the inscription, but it’s not a very popular stats so not that many people buy them. But berserker both the material to craft the inscription and the inscription itself are popular so the price is higher. You also have inscription that are not very popular, but the material needed to craft them is extremely rare like the Magguma lily.

- Changing stats on an armor is relatively cheap, but not cheap enough to change on a regular basis. Changing 6 pieces of armor into berserker will cost you about 70 gold. A lot less than a second ascended armor, but not something you want to pay more every week.

- For your Mesmer and Necro. If you want the best build for pve for each the Necro would want Viper and the Mesmer would want Berserker, Asssassins or Commander stats. The Mesmer isn’t really good at condi for PvE, but the Necro can do a decent job in zerker or marauder gear. So you could use a zerker armor for both character. In that case your mesmer would have one of the best gear for him, and your necro would have a decent gear. That said, the rune are not the same. So you could use the rune for your mesmer and limit your necro a little bit more. But I would suggest to pick your favorite and gear him in ascended, while using exotic armor and ascended weapons and trinket for the other. The difference in stats is negligible and the ascended weapons and trinket are not that expensive.

- Yes changing stats on armor or weapons is the same. The only difference is that they are using insignia or inscription.

Rauderi.8706:

You can’t compare temple events to hero challenges. Because those are not parallel. Temple events are meta events, like VB’s night phase or Tarir’s defense. The actual hero challenges in Orr are fairly simple.

Well someone could say that you can’t compare magguma Hero Challenge to Tyrian’s because they are worth 10 time more points, so it would make sense that they take more time or be more challenging to complete than the Tyrian’s one.

You only need 648 hero points to unlock everything on your character. You gain 398 just by leveling to 80 and there is 200 point in Tyria from challenge. That leave you only 50 pts left or 5 Magguma hero challenge to complete. There is far more than 5 easy single player hero challenge in magguma.

What I think is the problem is that people don’t want to complete 205 easy hero challenge, they complain because they would prefer to only do 25 hero challenge that give 10 pts each.

I think that in the end, Anet don’t consider that enough of a problem to be worth investing time to change it. Because they could remove the need to kill a raid boss to unlock the Forsaken Thicket mastery, that would be the easiest way to do that. But then people that raid, but don’t want to hunt down mastery point in either Magguma or Tyria will continue to complain about it.

Anet might just want to touch that, because a portion of the player base will always complain when they don’t like a portion of the content, but they need to do it for some type of reward.

The real answer is I think a little bit of both.

Of course when the expansion was launched everybody was playing in the new maps. In my guild I used to see about 10-20 guildmate on each of the new map and maybe 10-15 players anywhere else. Today, we are more spread out over all the maps of the game and it’s the same with everybody.

But there is still people playing those map. Enough to complete most of what you would want to complete. The specialisation, the weapons and xp won’t be a problem at all. You might have problem with some hero point that need a small group of people, but there is more than needed so you can skip those if you don’t want to wait for people to help you or find people with the LFG.

A problem with the expansion is that the new maps rely heavily on the LFG system, but they didn’t improve it. If you know how to use it, then you probably won’t have any problem. But it’s not obvious that you need to use it or how to use it properly in the game. So a lot of people just move around in an empty map, frustrating themselves, while there might be 2-3 map almost full that you could joint.

Malediktus.9250:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

50 shards per wing, 150 shards for the full raid. np
Means people who can oneshot every boss are capped right off the bat but still get shards for every boss.

11 shards per both so 99 for all 3 wings if anything. there is no need to give even more shards per week since you gain plenty from spare loot.

We already get 50 shards per wing, I understand that we shouldn’t buff the reward, but why nerf it to 33 shards per wing. We don’t want to nerf or buff the reward, we just want to keep it like it is right now.

Absurdo.8309:

I’m not sure you’re asking the right questions for this issue. I think the most relevant question is: Are the raid rewards, with shards, under-tuned or over-tuned?

Personally, I think they’re a bit under-tuned, given the weekly lockout. And shards are, at least to me, the most valuable reward from the bosses. So wing 3, without an increase in shards, would be an indirect nerf to rewards.

I do like how you can trade in minis for shards. And, in that sense, raid 3 will allow for more of that trading. But we have that now, and the rewards still seem under-tuned.

There’s nothing holy about a shard cap at 100. It could be any number. I think the analysis should focus on whether 100 will be an adequate cap for three wings.

Exactly. We should determine was is a decent reward for a wing and start from there to develop a system that work well with that reward.

Does the current system reward is rewarding enough for a wing? It depend which one.

A wing that you get 50 shards, the weekly drop and the double gold reward have a pretty great reward if you ask me. Like wing 2 is right now.

A wing that you get 50 shards, the weekly drop and standard gold reward have an ok reward. Like wing 1 is right now.

The problem is that even right now the second wing don’t give you 50 shards. With the guild booster and 1 or 2 fail during wing 1, you gonna reach the cap of 100 with the Bandit Trio.

A wing that give you zero shards, the weekly drop and double gold reward isn’t enough reward too if you ask me. What the wing 3 will be if nothing change.

And it’s worst because people are not stupid, they will see that and decide to do 2 wings. My group will probably do wing 3 and wing 1 and skip wing 2 for most weeks. After that, there will be few reason to do wing 2 because it will give zero shard, the weekly drop and standard gold.

So if the raid reward is good. It is for wing 1, wing 2 or incoming wing 3? Because they all give or will give different reward. Or do the overall reward for all wing is good? And if so is it good to have discrepancy or reward between different wing? And if so how much discrepancy is good?

Razor.9872:

Now that some have mentioned it, I do remember A-net implementing shards as a fallback reward-obtainer in the event that wanted items do not drop from defeated raid bosses to begin with.

Yes, you are totally right they said that. But they completely screwed up since Shards is the biggest reward the raid give right now. And honestly in their plan shards was suppose to only be a small portion of the reward, they would also have screwed up because then the rewards would just have been too low for the effort needed.

Baclavaman.9054:

HoT didnt ruined the game because it added new content to play with however the amount of content was a turn off for us.

Well it’s not all it did. HoT also added :

- some of the biggest powercreep in the game. Making most of the core game even more easy and less fun to play since you are so much more powerful now.

- Limiting build diversity by adding elite spec that are almost mandatory in meta build. To be honest they changed other thing at the same thing so the build diversity didn’t drop overall, it stayed the same.

- Complete changed some of the old content to a worst version of it. WvW, Dungeon and Fractal. They since fixed fractal and reverted back the change to WvW and Dungeon, but the damage is already done and both community are only a shadow of their former self.

- They added huge gold sink with the Scribe and Guild Hall and honestly both bring very little to the players.

They spent a lot of resources on flops with the expansion and they need to spend a lot of resources just to fix them back.

Well in WvW you can roam or pug zerg or guild zerg.

Roam can be in a small team or solo. You basically roam the map in search of same unfortunate target like a hunter. You will be able to find solo target, but most good roamer want to 1 vs 2 or 3 because they usually have specialized pvp killer build, while most WvWers either use version of their PvE build or zerg build not that great in small fight.

You can also pug Zerg just by finding a tag on the map. It will depend on which server you are and what match up you are doing.

For the last one, ya you gonna need a group, but you usually already have some experience in either roaming or pug zerging before you go into these group.

And as you rank up in WvW you get Proof of Heroics that you can exchange for Hero Points. So you can unlock everything just by doing WvW. But to be honest, you follow a guide from Dulfy and you will get all your Hero Point super fast in HoT maps.

Dinosaurs.8674:

GameGuard.8610:

That wouldn’t fix the ussue. Prob is you shard capped after 6 bosses so last 3 you wont get any shards

The whole “being capped after 2 wings” thing is irrelevant because the magnetite reward per boss is not going to stay the same if the cap is still 100. It will be reduced such that clearing all three wings gives 100 magnetite, likely to about what it was at the release of the first wing.

What do you mean, the never changed the quantity of shards being dropped from boss. We used to drop 50 shards per wing 1 clear while we had a cap of 100, we are still dropping 50 shards for wing 1 and 2 while we have a cap of 100 and unless they decide to now change thing it will still give us 50 shards for wing 1, 2 and 3 while having a cap of 100.

They could drop the amount of shard each boss give us so completing all 3 wings give us 100 shards. But that’s a direct nerf to the reward of raid and I don’t see any reason for that. The current reward for the raid is okish only. I don’t think it should be buffed, but I certainly don’t think it should be nerf and unless they change the value of shards, leaving the cap at 100 will be a nerf in reward for 1/3 of the raid no matter what.

This will just push people to complete only 2 out of the 3 wing each week. We should be able to choose if we want to complete 1, 2 or 3 wing at a giving week with no penalty if you want to complete all 3 wings. I understand a penalty for repeating the same wing during the same week, but getting no shards for completing a wing for the first time is just stupid.

Rising Dusk.2408:

For reference, the Fractals team has been interfacing with the Raids team with the eventual goal to convert every Fractal into a much more compelling experience with greater depth of difficulty at high scales. We saw this first with the Cliffside revamp, and will continue to see it in more Fractals in the future.

Fractals are ANet’s intention for end-game 5-man content, whereas Raids are the end-game 10-man content. Once everything gets to a good place with Fractals, it should fulfill your desires there.

As far as I’m concern, I don’t give a crap about that until it’s in the game.

Vayne.8563:

Nor does it make it pay to win. The argument isn’t good or bad. The argument is about pay to win. People tend to take words at face value but face value doesn’t actually give you a good definition of what words mean. As long as people use words that I feel are wrongly used, I’ll repeat it. And why not repeat it. Not one single person has given me an answer to the question. So repeat it I shall.

More to the point, pay to win, as a phrase was created by a specific purpose. If you want to take it literally all games that aren’t free are pay to win because you have to buy them to win. That’s paying to win. But that’s not the definition of the term and no one would use it that way, unless they were trolling.

You can argue if this set up is good or bad, but it’s not pay to win.

Play Maple Story if you want to see what pay to win really is.

Ok I’ll answer your question directly then. Yes, most if not all MMO have pay to win aspect in them. It’s not the worst kind of pay to win, but if an expansion give you more powerful stuff, not balanced with the core game, it is pay to win. Some MMO mitigate it by segregating the player base between expansion owner and core owner. Usually this is more about PvP.

It’s not a on and off switch. There is varying degree of pay to win aspect to games.

cletiscake.9173:

Thaddeus.4891:

Ok first of all Narc never ran your ’’DPS’’ Variant. He ran 2 differents specialisation out of 3 and use zero of the same skills as you. The only thing the two builds have in common is Writ of Persistance + Hammer + Celestial gear. Very different builds.

What i don’t understand about this build is the use. I mean, Hammer healing guardian can be a thing for difficult group content, but you have very poor support. You concentrate mostly on your own survivability (too much if you ask me). Personally, I don’t mind about non meta build as long as it’s not only selfish survivability. But if that’s how you like to play go for it.

Youre right Thaddeus, that was an oversight on my part. Narc didnt run the exact same version of the build i posted, though he did run a similar version. Thats an important distinction and ive edited my post to reflect that.

Ive also edited my post to be more clear in terms of what the point of the build is. Youre absolutely right in that it doesnt offer much besides surviveability. But its important to understand that this build offers a TON of healing and mitigation not just for personal survivability, but for the group as well. Virtually every heal/block/boon applied to myself is also applied to allies around me. It is truly a tank/heal build.

The build also had a shout-heal alternative before the pre-HoT patch which allowed you to provide lots of boons to your allies. That is no longer viable with the current trait setup, so the alternative was to take healing meditations for more personal surviveability. Increasing our personal surviveability allows us to stay alive almost indefinitely, which allows us to provide Protection and AoE healing to allies.

But you should really take the Healing Shout for that build.

Vayne.8563:

Name an MMO where an expansion doesn’t give you advantages? Pay to win has always meant to cover having to regularly spend money in the cash shop. Every time I see this I ask people, tell me what MMO is not pay to win by this standard? It’s ludicrous.

You really need to spot to repeat that same thing over and over. It’s lazy design to cater to the players that want progression. It’s bad in other game and it’s no different in gw2. It’s the exact same reason why we got CGI action filled blockbuster movie. It sell well in the immediate and it’s easy to do. It doesn’t make it good.

Yah more powercreep because that number isn’t right. I can’t see any reason why not.

Ok first of all Narc never ran your ’’DPS’’ Variant. He ran 2 differents specialisation out of 3 and use zero of the same skills as you. The only thing the two builds have in common is Writ of Persistance + Hammer + Celestial gear. Very different builds.

What i don’t understand about this build is the use. I mean, Hammer healing guardian can be a thing for difficult group content, but you have very poor support. You concentrate mostly on your own survivability (too much if you ask me). Personally, I don’t mind about non meta build as long as it’s not only selfish survivability. But if that’s how you like to play go for it.

Celine.6857:

I just don’t understand why having Ley Gliding is such an issue, when this is way more achievable than having ascended gear and particular builds one may not be as familiar with just to complete a raid. At least with gliding you achieve this by simply playing GW2 and not grinding for half the year to just be accepted into a team to just see what Raiding is like.

Because of this, and the problems @Thaddeus stated above (finding 10 people willing to have a go at any one time), I cannot see myself ever raiding and it does make me sad.

Well IMO it was worth it. It really depend on what you like in the game. Getting ascended gear isn’t hard at all if you give you that as a medium term goal and I just simply don’t understand this play a build one may not be as familiar with? Understanding a build doesn’t take that much time, especially if it’s on your main.

LegACy.1296:

STIHL.2489:

Honestly, as far as the game as a whole goes, raids didn’t provide anything that could not have been done better with 5 person instance based content.

Nope, sorry, gonna have to disagree with you on this one. I played raid (and stayed in the game because of the raid), but I hate, hate, hate fractal. Hell, I think before HoT my fractal level isn’t even 20.

So yeah, raid actually offers people like me something that the game didn’t provide before, so that’s a good thing.

I don’t know. I mean I like raid and right now it’s the only thing that I play in gw2. But I would still have preferred a 5 man content. My problem with raid right now is more about the organization. It’s hard to have 10 people available for a raid at the same time and we need to plan in advance. Most raid guild end up with a spreadsheet for their schedule. I loved when we used to do dungeon and fractal on the fly when we were 5 online.

That said, 10 man allow you more different build. There is just too much profession that are needed are mechanics to counter. You fill out a 5man team with basic role very quickly, leaving no place for anything else.

I still think that I would have more fun with a super challenging 5 man content than the current 10 man raid. Even if I prefer the 10 man raid, than no challenging content like before.

1) It’s subjective and I will tell you yes and no. Raid is enjoyable as hell, but can’t be picked up 1-2 without feelling lost at first. As for the new maps, I will say the first 2 maps with no problems. But for the 3rd and 4th map you will probably have some difficulty at first. The 3rd map is pretty light on the content, so most people just do the big boss each 2 hours so you need to get into the map at the right time. The 4th map is on a 2 hours rotation and it only work when it’s a full map. So you need to get into the map like in the first 10-15min or forget about it.

2) Well there is a finite amount of content so like any PvE content it will eventually be repetitive. Does it become grindy fast or not for you is subjective. But you usually need material from all 4 maps so you can do a bit of each map if you like them all and it won’t feel grindy that much. But if you decide to focus on one map then it will probably feel grindy pretty fast. The good thing is that each maps have several events chain so you can complete each map (1-2 hours) between 3 and 6 times without viewing the same event twice. So I would say that you have about 20-30 hours of new content in the 4 maps. After that you will start to repeat things, but how grindy it will feel will depend how you play them and what you want.

3) Both. I mean as an elementalist a lot of stuff will 2 shots you and if you fight a veteran alone you won’t be able to kill him in 2 seconds. That say, these enemies have a lot of good mechanics that you can counter when you know it. These are some of the more interesting enemies to fight. If you liked the enemies from silverwaste, they kind of did the same thing in the HoT maps, but with more diversity.

4) Raid are really hard. People can take 5-15 hours of practice before their first kill and a group is as weak as their weakess players. So ya people won’t accept new players or this will most likely cost them the fight and waste hours of their time for nothing. That said if you are a good players, have good build, good gear and play more than 1 profession you will only need to find groups to pratice. You can write that in your LFG but try to do that Monday or Tuesday next after the reset. Not as much people raid later in the week. There is training guild that exist (look for a post in the raid subforum) that will be your best bet. Or in the ideal world you can find a raiding guild that will accept you and show you the fights. Raiding guild always bleed players over time and smart one always try to find new players as replacements. If you are good players with good build raiding guild will want to train you, these kind of player are rare these days. But be prepare to wipe a LOT. Like I said, most people will take between 5 and 15 hours before they do their first kill and it’s not because you killed him once that you will succeed everytimes again that boss.

5) In Open world do whatever you want. Some event need specific skill like CC, but other than that it’s free. Raid is another story. You do have some room for build I mean people did the raid half naked, in team of 10 guardians, with weird build, etc. But those are usually great team that know the fight. For most people, they will ask you a good build and good gear for mainly 2 reasons.

- Give them the best chance they can. The fight can easily fail, having 10 people with good build and good composition will give the group a better chance even if it won’t make up for a bad team with not enough knowledge of the fight.

- Respect for others. It’s a rule in my guild group at least. We fight as a team and we need to respect each other and part of that is to try our best. I paid for good foods and took the time to make a good build, I expect the same from everybody.

But to be honest, I rarely see gear check in raid. But people will remark if you bring something weird into a fight. I mean if you are doing slothazor as a guardian and don’t bring reflect, people will call you out. If you do VG and you pull the agro off the tank because you have a lot of toughness, people will call you out.

For strait answer. You get them both from completing respectively Arah and Cadecus Manor achivement of getting all 37 skins for armors and weapons. Once you completed these achievement you receive the accessories and they are unlocked at the laurel vendor if you would want to buy more, but you can only buy them with Laurels and Glob of Ectoplasm. You can’t buy them with guild commendation like other accessories.

Daddicus.6128:

Thaddeus.4891:

From what I can see, your problem seem to be about the storyline needing masteries than the grindiness of the masteries themselves.

YES! This is what I’ve been trying to say, so far not nearly clearly enough. Thank you!

My idea would remove that gating (mostly), but only toon-by-toon. You don’t get gliding account wide until you’ve earned the account-wide total. But, individual toons could progress.

Thank you, thank you!!!

Ok just a word of advice. Next time take time to put your idea together and focus on what you are trying to say, keep it simple and make sure that your title reflect what you want to talk about. Because right now for like 90% of people your post is a rant about how HoT is grindy, not on the presence of masteries that block your progression into the story. That’s a recipe for disaster as most people won’t even talk about what you wish and you only have yourself to blame for that.

I agree with bandit. And I think everybody agree too. This is a terrible raid boss. Way too easy and boring. But I disagree with slothazor and matthias. They both have decent difficulty. Both are the only boss, where the majority of the groups are using 2 Druids for heals. At slothazor if someone drop the green at the wrong place it’s a wipe, if too many people don’t dodge the wet dog it’s a wipe, if the tank doesn’t move the boss fast enough it’s wipe etc. And for Matthias there is quite enough pressure for plenty of wipe at the last phase.

Zenith.7301:

This might come as a surprise to you, but not everybody has your twitch/platforming skills.

Fallen Masks, Shooting Gallery, the Beetles, Floor Is Lava and Golem are probably going to take people more than a day or two to get gold on.

What I don’t understand is that I have all masteries and I think I did 2 maybe 3 gold medal and they were all those that I could do with no problem. I never completed any of those gold adventure you talking about. It didn’t stopped me from maxing all masteries.

Even if you do zero gold adventure you will still have 124 Mastery points, more than the 117 needed.

Daddicus.6128:

I see what you’re saying, but it’s simply not true. There was a storyline mission early on that you could not do until you got the first mastery. Yeah, it was something like a tutorial, but then they continued the same tactic: require masteries in order to progress the storyline.

It IS grindy, and there ARE gaps.

From what I can see, your problem seem to be about the storyline needing masteries than the grindiness of the masteries themselves.

The problem is that grind is subjective. No matter how not grindy something is, there will always be some people complaining that it’s too grindy. And no matter how monstrously grindy something is, there will always be people saying that it’s not.

Because grind is subjective. Grind is only how frustrating and unpleasant the progression is to you. And that’s different for everybody.

Seteruss.4058:

Is dragonhunter available only when you fully train it? meaning you need all 400 points to start using it?
I do train first 3 but is unavailable at pve.
Noob question but i m only 5 days to game.
Thanks in advance and sry for the off topic

Do you mean Dragonhunter the Elite Spec or the Rune? Because the post is about the rune, but you seem to talk about the Elite Spec.

Anyway, you only need 30 HP to unlock DH the elite spec. At that point you can take the new spec and use the new weapon, but you will have nothing unlocked (trait or skill). As you get more HP and unlock more stuff you can use them. But I wouldn’t suggest using DH until you have at least some of the trait unlocked.

STIHL.2489:

Not at all, what is going on here, is that the Restaurant (GW2) at one time served the exact kind of wine they liked. So they frequented the establishment, gladly enjoying everything on the menu.

Then Anet changes the menu and their wine lists, and does not include the wine they like, so they tell Anet that since they no longer serve the wine they like, they will no longer be ordering from the menu.

And what content ’’wine’’ did they removed concerning raid? I mean, ya they did remove stuff with HoT or put the stuff behind HoT that used to be core, but it’s about raid. A content that wasn’t there and never changed. To date, they only added different content ’’wine’’ to their menu. Some of which that some people like and other that some people disliked. Did they had raid before and changed it? No. Did they add requirement that used to be not there to the existing wing? No.

jheryn.8390:

I don’t believe you. It is pretty obvious that you do care what others choose to do or you would let them express their opinions and not say a word. If you really don’t care, why bother to comment at all?

Because people try to actively change the current raid that he like. It’s a content that he enjoy, and people that don’t like it are trying to change it. In the case of this particular tread it happen that we find the ley-line glinging an extremely good idea. Something different that will add fun to new raid fight and we don’t want Anet to scrap that idea entirely because a bunch of people don’t want to put a couple of hours to level up their masteries. We don’t give a kitten if you don’t like the content, but we care when people want to change what we like about the game.

Really people still asking this kind of question? It was obviously clear when HoT was introduced that the legendary armor won’t come until the Wing 3 will be in-game.

winterchillz.2564:

Stop using AP as a method to determine one’s skill already. Back when I had 3k AP I was already trying to solo some of the fractals, last night we pugged last spot for T4 and got a person with 21k AP who had absolutely zero idea what to do in the Snowblind fractal, AP judgement is not a reliable method unless the person has like less or equal to at least 1,5k and even in this case it’s not a guarantee that the person isn’t someone who knows their stuff.

And stop trying to control what other people are doing?? I mean, I find using AP stupid just like you and I would never put it in a LFG description, but I doesn’t mean that I should be a pain in the kitten to everybody that want to use the AP. It’s not a good system, but it can help clear a good portion of the bad player and that’s what the people using it are looking for. They don’t give a crap about cutting very good player with it. All they care is to make sure a good portion of less experienced players won’t join their group.

They can use the AP if they want, just like you can dislike it if you want. But don’t tell them to stop doing it.

Astralporing.1957:

You’re right, they have made a mistake. Notice however how that mistake didn’t really negatively impact Fractal participation at all. If anything, it was the opposite.

You mean in the long term? Yah when they fixed their mistake it was ok. But it took them 5-6 months. All I’m saying, is that people with near zero experience in raid are launching bad idea left and right about magnetite shard. Idea that would be a mistake and would make pugging near impossible for normal raid. If they can pull easy mode off with a good reward balance that won’t hurt the current raid and will instead expand the community by including people that don’t presently raid, then I’m all for it.

All I saying is that people have legitimate reason to don’t want to try or at least be afraid of the possible consequences. There is a lot more ways to screw this up and to succeed.

Ohoni.6057:

Some people claim that they enjoy challenging content. Personally I don’t get it, and apparently neither do you, but so long as those people exist, there will always be people who will do the harder version “because it’s there.”

Oh man, you are so good at that. Making people wanting to stop talking to you.

We don’t know how they will be acquirable. We only know that they will add more ways to acquire them with the LS3 update (there is only 4 big update per year).

But I agree that the stats are a mess right now. Some exotic insignia cost less than a gold, other cost 15 gold, some are account bound and can take 5 days to craft, same variability with ascended trinket. Do the boring guild mission? They cost the equivalent of 16 gold, don’t want to do them or your guild don’t do them? That will cost you more than 50 then. Unless you want some special stats like assassin or sinister, you gonna need to unlock them with special achievement. Ok good I’ll do that, no problem. Oh but if you want a 2nd pair you gonna need to pay 100 gold, you can’t use guild commendation for those.

It was making sense then they launched their content. They wanted to push people toward certain content, but now it’s just an annoyance.

AliamRationem.5172:

I don’t think it’s unreasonable for players to have the expectation that personal objectives such as HP/MP challenges be primarily solo content.

And what is the percentage of HP that can be soloed in HOT? Hit, it’s more than 60%. So how are they not primarily solo?

See people are not complaining that they are not primarily solo content, they are complaining that they are not entirely solo content. Key difference.

Ohoni.6057:

So what? If people want to do the easier mode then that’s fine too. If people want to do the hard mode then it’ll be there for them. If the balance is off, they can tweak it as they go, but it’s not the end of the world either way.

People keep insisting “if they can’t make it perfect then they shouldn’t even bother!” Well if that’s the standard then they shouldn’t have attempted raids in the first place. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, they don’t have to get it perfect, they just have to do the best they can.

It’s not about making it perfect. It’s about not making it useless to run high level. Like I said. It was useless to run high level fractal for 5-6 months. They did that mistake in fractal, nothing stopping them from doing the same mistake in raid too. Half a year of raid being useless to run is a pretty big deal.

Ohoni.6057:

Except that mode players asking for that (myself at the very least), intended it to only give a small amount of magnetite for completing each raid boss in easy mode, and with no shards for failures. This means that a player who fully cleared all six existing bosses in easy mode would only get about as many shards as a better raider could get for clearing VG and like half a Gorseval fight, and then that’s it, he’s done for the week until it resets. If he wants more shards he’d have to pity-grind in hard mode.

It would be designed to be a slow-but-steady progression through the rewards, not a shortcut.

Now eventually there will be like 2-3 dozen bosses, and maybe he could hit the cap by beating a dozen or two of them, but that would take most of his week anyway, so I don’t see why that would be an issue, and even with just hard mode that’s an issue that will have to be dealt with. What would it currently take to hit the cap without any pity-shards? Like how many of the existing bosses, assuming you could do each of them multiple times for full credit? Twelve or so?

You can hit the cap in like 4-5 bosses right now. So people will asked themselve. Is it easier to cap by doing easy mode 3-4 times during the week or by doing the normal raid once? Oh of course for veteran team that can do both wing in 1-2 hours, the won’t go into easy mode, but that’s because they already did all the hard work to get there. Easy mode will take 45-60min to complete both wing. If you get as much shards as you said, then you gonna need to complete it 3 times (plus like 2-3 more boss) per week to cap your shards.

So in easy mode it take about 3 hours to reach the shards cap with a success rate of near 100%. How many people have can complete 5 raids boss in 3 hours? Not that many people outside of team. This will completely destroy the pugging community of raid. Nobody will ever pug a raid ever again. There will be team that will do normal raid and pug that do easy mode. Because why take a chance to waste 3 hours in a pug and not getting much kills and not reaching the cap, when you farm easy mode and get the cap in 3 hours guarantee?

If there is an easy mode. They need to stay away from Magnetite shards or change the system before introducing easy mode. Shard already have a problem since it take 5 boss to cap them and in not so long we gonna have 9 boss. 4 of them giving no shards to groups.

They could give different cap to shard in easy mode so you can cap in normal and then do easy mode to cap that one. But they shouldn’t give give shards from easy mode without changing anything else.

OnizukaBR.8537:

People saying that an easy mode will make raid worst, but you dont see people complaining about level 90+ fractals, or about wanting a Tier 4 chest for doing a level 10 fractal.

No, but but 1-2 months ago nobody was doing T4 because the reward system was unbalanced. A well done easy/training/entry level raid isn’t a problem. But it’s easy to create a badly unbalance one that give you too much reward for the amount of work, making the actual raid not rewarding enough. Some company that I consider better than Anet did that very mistake with bad consequences and Anet did that mistake not so long ago (and they ain’t that good a balancing reward to begin with).

Fractal at HoT was giving you the same reward in 51 to 100, meaning there was no reason to do a high level reward wise. It’s not some hypothetical stupid argument that could never happen, anet just fixed that mistake 2 months ago. No reason why they couldn’t repeat that same mistake again.

And it’s not just Anet. A lot of people on the forum are asking for it without knowing it. I saw plenty of people asking for the easy mode to ’’just’’ give magnetite shards, without realizing that it’s one of the biggest reward of the raid and that with the cap, it would make no sense to do the normal raid after you capped shard in easy mode.

Could an easy mode be a very good addition? Yes. Could it destroy the current raid if not done correctly? Absolutely yes. And that’s why raiders are anxious about that idea. Because they saw anet did that mistake not so long ago and other company do it as well and it ruined raiding for a long time.